Gary Marshall: Sony Vaio: time to say goodbye to the 'fun Macbook'

It looks like we're about to lose another iconic tech brand: Sony's saying goodbye to the PC and selling off its Vaio computer division.

It's a victim of what Sony calls "drastic changes in the global PC industry", and it's a real shame for a range that boasted Steve Jobs in its fan club.

Vaio's logo represents the move from analogue to digital technology - the VA is an analogue wave, the IO binary - and the brand helped make PCs fun after more than a decade of beige boxes.

The first Vaio landed in the early 90s and the PCG-505 showed the best and worst of Sony: a terrible naming system attached to a really nice product.

Where other firms gave you a choice of beige or black, Sony's first generation Vaio came in bluey-purple - and it did so in a case that, for the time, was incredibly thin and light. Add in an unusual cylindrical battery and co-ordinated add-ons and you had something considerably more interesting than other firms' fare.

Robot dogs and orange blobs

That wasn't the only odd or interesting thing from Sony.

There was the late-90s PCG-C1, a subnotebook with a rotating "Motion Eye" camera:

The mid-2000s Vaio U and UX series, ahead-of-their-time tablets that turned up in Bond movies and Terminator: Salvation but which were hobbled by their desktop Windows operating systems:

Then there were the oddly-shaped, Android-powered Tablet P and S:

The extremely orange and extremely wide Vaio P Series:

And most recently, the Vaio Flip hybrids and the Vaio Tap tablets.

And that's just the computer line: over the years Sony has also delighted us with mad-looking MiniDisc machines, the decidedly odd Rolly rolling alarm clock and the much-missed Aibo robot dog.

I've long thought of Sony as the mad Apple, a firm that not only makes beautifully engineered, bomb-proof products but that also gets wildly overexcited and puts out really odd things for the sheer hell of it. Orange laptops! Robot dogs! Alarm clocks you have to chase around the house!

In most firms, ideas like that would be laughed at. Sony launched them.

That's why it's a shame that the Vaio brand appears to be going. The mad machines may have been in the minority, but at least Sony made them. The world of tech will be that little bit duller without them.

• So why did Sony sell? Dan Grabham has all the answers

Gary Marshall: iAnywhere? iDoubt it - why Apple won't merge OS X with iOS

Here's an odd one: according to an analyst at JP Morgan, Apple is working on a "converged Mac OS/iOS operating system that allows an iPhone or iPad to dock into a specially configured display to run as a computer."

The analysts have dubbed it "iAnywhere" and reckon we could see it in roughly a year's time because the "iPad has not stepped up to become the next growth chariot." You know things are serious when terms such as "growth chariot" are being bandied about.

Just think. It could be as big as the Motorola Atrix, or Windows RT!

The idea of a converged OS is fun, but it doesn't make a great deal of sense. What problem would it solve? We've already seen what happens when you try to combine desktop and mobile OSes for no good reason: you bring out Windows RT and everybody goes "huh?"

Huh?

I'm not hating on Windows here, but it does demonstrate what happens when you try to make an OS that's desktop and mobile and touch and mouse: it annoys everybody because it's too mobile-y for the desktop users and too desktop-y for mobile.

Microsoft tried it, blew it, and has been backpedalling ever since. Meanwhile Apple's decidedly non-hybrid Macs have continued to take a greater share of the PC market's money.

OS X and iOS are growing closer, but a merger seems unlikely. Here's why.

Different strokes for different folks

I reckon I'm a fairly typical computer user. I have a powerful, big-screened computer for work and for demanding tasks such as music production. I have a tablet for shouting at people on the internet when I'm on the sofa. And I have a phone for shouting at people on the internet when I'm on the bus.

Each device has different priorities. There's some overlap, of course, but generally speaking my computer is all about the power, my phone the portability, my tablet the ability to wage war from my sofa and chuck videos to my Apple TV.

You can take them out of their comfort zones, but that involves compromise: what's just great on a 27-inch screen won't be much fun on a phone, and apps designed for mobile use lack the power you expect from "proper" PCs. I'd no more write a book on an iPhone than I'd use an iMac to Instagram my dinner.

The hardware lines may blur - the rumoured iPad Pro and 12-inch MacBook Pro, if they exist, will have broadly similar specs: flash storage, retina displays, multi-core processors, long battery life - but the software remains separate: iOS on an iMac would dumb it down, and OS X on an iPad would be about as much fun as Windows XP was on Tablet PCs.

If you want to offer the best of both worlds you have three options.

One, you can run two OSes, as an ATIV Q does with Windows and Android (or a Boot Camp-ing Mac does with OS X and Windows).

Two, you can make a dual-mode OS like Microsoft did.

Or three, you can do what Apple's already doing: share data and features, but keep the systems separate. That seems to be working pretty well so far.

It's important to take Apple's pronouncements with a pinch of salt - when Apple says it won't do something, that often just means it isn't doing it right now - but I think Phil Schiller was telling the truth when he ruled out a merger of OS X and iOS.

"You'll see them be the same where that makes sense," he said. "And you'll see them be different in those things that are critical to their success."

Apple, it seems, is still thinking different.

• Apple in 2014: what to expect

Gary Marshall: iAnywhere? iDoubt it - why Apple won't merge OS X with iOS

Here's an odd one: according to an analyst at JP Morgan, Apple is working on a "converged Mac OS/iOS operating system that allows an iPhone or iPad to dock into a specially configured display to run as a computer."

The analysts have dubbed it "iAnywhere" and reckon we could see it in roughly a year's time because the "iPad has not stepped up to become the next growth chariot." You know things are serious when terms such as "growth chariot" are being bandied about.

Just think. It could be as big as the Motorola Atrix, or Windows RT!

The idea of a converged OS is fun, but it doesn't make a great deal of sense. What problem would it solve? We've already seen what happens when you try to combine desktop and mobile OSes for no good reason: you bring out Windows RT and everybody goes "huh?"

Huh?

I'm not hating on Windows here, but it does demonstrate what happens when you try to make an OS that's desktop and mobile and touch and mouse: it annoys everybody because it's too mobile-y for the desktop users and too desktop-y for mobile.

Microsoft tried it, blew it, and has been backpedalling ever since. Meanwhile Apple's decidedly non-hybrid Macs have continued to take a greater share of the PC market's money.

OS X and iOS are growing closer, but a merger seems unlikely. Here's why.

Different strokes for different folks

I reckon I'm a fairly typical computer user. I have a powerful, big-screened computer for work and for demanding tasks such as music production. I have a tablet for shouting at people on the internet when I'm on the sofa. And I have a phone for shouting at people on the internet when I'm on the bus.

Each device has different priorities. There's some overlap, of course, but generally speaking my computer is all about the power, my phone the portability, my tablet the ability to wage war from my sofa and chuck videos to my Apple TV.

You can take them out of their comfort zones, but that involves compromise: what's just great on a 27-inch screen won't be much fun on a phone, and apps designed for mobile use lack the power you expect from "proper" PCs. I'd no more write a book on an iPhone than I'd use an iMac to Instagram my dinner.

The hardware lines may blur - the rumoured iPad Pro and 12-inch MacBook Pro, if they exist, will have broadly similar specs: flash storage, retina displays, multi-core processors, long battery life - but the software remains separate: iOS on an iMac would dumb it down, and OS X on an iPad would be about as much fun as Windows XP was on Tablet PCs.

If you want to offer the best of both worlds you have three options.

One, you can run two OSes, as an ATIV Q does with Windows and Android (or a Boot Camp-ing Mac does with OS X and Windows).

Two, you can make a dual-mode OS like Microsoft did.

Or three, you can do what Apple's already doing: share data and features, but keep the systems separate. That seems to be working pretty well so far.

It's important to take Apple's pronouncements with a pinch of salt - when Apple says it won't do something, that often just means it isn't doing it right now - but I think Phil Schiller was telling the truth when he ruled out a merger of OS X and iOS.

"You'll see them be the same where that makes sense," he said. "And you'll see them be different in those things that are critical to their success."

Apple, it seems, is still thinking different.

• Apple in 2014: what to expect

Gary Marshall: Apple: it just works (eventually)

Slogans are powerful things, but they can often become sticks to beat their creators with: how many times do you think Google's execs wished they'd never come up with "don't be evil"? Apple's equivalent is probably "it just works", which pretty much everyone on the planet is familiar with.

Other firms' products require endless patches and cause endless irritation, but Apple's stuff just works.

...except when it doesn't.

Maybe this is an unusually bad week, but today alone our front page has two stories of Apple stuff that didn't just work: there's a Mavericks update to make Gmail work properly in Mail, and Apple has also issued a software fix to stop MacBook Pros from freezing.

That's not all. I was one of very many Mavericks upgraders whose initial installation refused to finish, citing terrible hard disk damage, and others seem even unluckier: some Western Digital external drive users have seen their data disappear.

And then there's iWork, the exciting new update that took away stacks of features that power users had come to depend upon. Apple has since published a support document detailing the missing features it's going to put back in. And lots of people are pretty unhappy with iOS 7 too.

Have we gone from "it just works" to "it might work"?

Damaging the brand?

It's tempting to accuse Apple of slipping quality control, but then Apple has dropped the ball before. Remember iOS 6 Maps, or the furore over Final Cut Pro X? And before anyone invokes the increasingly annoying "this would never have happened under Steve Jobs" mantra, we need to throw in the launch of MobileMe, the buttonless iPod Shuffle and the cracking - literally - G4 Cube.

Perhaps the truth is simple: Apple has always messed up, but today it appears to be messing up on a much bigger scale because it's a much bigger company with a much bigger profile, catering for a much wider variety of customers in a much wider variety of configurations and circumstances. It's not any less competent than before. It's just under much more scrutiny.

That may be true, but even if it is it's a worry: Apple's entire brand is based on being better, on delivering a premium experience and charging accordingly, and if it breaks that promise the brand image suffers as a result. You buy Apple stuff because it doesn't throw a strop halfway through an OS installation, wipe your external drive and refuse to play nice with your documents. You buy it because it doesn't produce mysterious errors or shut down or freeze for no good reason.

You buy Apple stuff on a promise, and that promise is "it just works".

If it doesn't, what exactly are you paying a premium for?